


If you court this disaster (I’ll point you home)

by FlamingoQueen



Series: Cyborg Cowboy Biker Bitch [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Cowboy Hats, Eventual Happy Ending, Goat Farm, Goats, Idiots in Love, M/M, Mesquite, Motorcycles, Mutual Pining, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Residual trauma, Texas, intimacy issues, zucchini - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:55:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24282436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlamingoQueen/pseuds/FlamingoQueen
Summary: “Lots of motorcycles,” Bucky says, aiming for nonchalant and probably missing it by a mile. “Lots of leather. If you’re up for it…” He licks his lips, takes the plunge. “Maybe you want a cyborg cowboy bitch on the back of your bike as you zip up and down some country roads?”Or: Bucky retreats to Texas to raise goats and work on his recovery, while Steve wrestles with shield and duty in New York. But life in Podunk, Texas (population: Bucky) isn’t what he expected it to be, not really. There’s a lot less cactus and a lot more goats. A lot more time to think and lot less Steve. That last is a problem. He really should have seen it coming.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Cyborg Cowboy Biker Bitch [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1752922
Comments: 17
Kudos: 25





	If you court this disaster (I’ll point you home)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [glittercake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glittercake/gifts).



> So it turns out all I need to hear is “Excuse me, Bucky in a cowboy hat” and this happens. Happy birthday, GlitterCake! It's been, what, half a year at least since this thing got poked into being?
> 
> (This is a totally different universe than Hazy, by the way, meaning that not everything has to be horrible. That said, Bucky’s still been through shit, and he’s still going to have some scars he’s dealing with.)

**—Somewhere in Central Texas | Late August, Tuesday afternoon—**

Bucky pulls himself straighter and rolls his arms back until he feels the crickle-crack of a good stretch settling in between his shoulder blades. Walking goes a long way toward loosening up his perpetually aching back, but it doesn’t go all the way, can’t go all the way. 

Probably nothing short of the next unfortunate amputation will go all the way, and he kinda wants to keep the metal arm he’s got, even if it’s fucking heavy and the aesthetic’s a little more Soviet he’d like. The star’s pretty, at least, if you don’t think about it too hard. 

He looks out at the horizon, at the field fence trailing ahead of him through the trees and out of sight, at the grass swaying in the wind, browned from the summer heat, guarded by scrubby mesquite full of thorns and dangling bean pods and scrubbier yaupon with their ripening berries like clumps of frogspawn, the whole mess dotted with cedar and dappled by the shade of the occasional gnarled live oak looming above the fray. 

Damn, it’s hot out here. And bright. The grass that managed to grow under the trees is fucking lucky, with all that shade, and the rest of it is still lucky to get that breeze rushing through it. And he’s pretty damn _un_ lucky, having to march through all this, getting everything caught on grabby mesquite and only slightly less greedy yaupon. 

The goats like the yaupon and keep it mostly in check—at least the bottom six feet of it, where they can reach—but he really oughta bring the machete out here and hack all the mesquite down, except it’s mesquite, and it’ll come right back. Cedar, too. Regular endless task, that. 

Like the dude. Whatever his name was. Not Syphilis, but close. The one with the rock. Fuck, that’s going to bug him all day. His phone’s just in his back pocket. He could look it up. Google is no JARVIS, but even so, Google would save the day here.

Bucky very carefully and thoughtfully does _not_ look it up. He’s on a mission here, and looking up stupid shit about sex diseases shoving rocks uphill is not the mission. The stupid goat is the mission.

How’d he even get to thinking about this? Oh. Right. The fucking mesquite.

He supposes he could clear a few feet inside the fence line, even if it’ll only ever be a temporary fix. Make it easy to spot any damage the fencing takes between his rounds, any places the woven wire’s met something bigger or more determined than it was meant to keep in—or out. 

For goats, 10-gauge is plenty, overkill, even. Hell, it oughta be plenty for cattle, too, if you added some frills. Bit of barbed wire along the top and through the middle. Electricity—as though he’d be okay with that. Probably lose his damn mind if he brushed up against an electric fence. He can do without that, thanks. He’s all full-up on his lifetime quota of electric fences.

But as sturdy as this field fencing is, it still needs some work here and there. Still gets dinged and worse by the occasional falling tree, or the neighbor’s incredibly angry bull, whenever he gets out and the goats piss him off enough to bring him charging through no man’s land to bust a second fence and get himself onto _this_ property.

And livestock and coyotes aren’t the only things that might want to mess with the damn fence in the first place. Tony’s improvements only go after the sort of trespassers that are more interested in him than his girls—he’d insisted, because when old man Warner comes over to collect his testosterone-laden war-cow, he can’t very well run into military-grade defenses.

That’d never fly. Not under the radar, over the radar or right smack _into_ the radar. Nope. He’s not nuking his neighbors. It ain’t neighborly. 

But it is just good practice—and also plenty neighborly—to clear the whole fence line. Hot, heavy, aching work, tearing down all that mesquite and cedar, and never really done. But also far from a thankless job. For one thing, keeping the fence line completely clear will make afternoons like this one easier, even if no less sweaty.

Bucky reaches up, pulls the ivory stetson off his head, and gives his brow a wipe with the back of his sleeve. When he gets back to the house, he’s putting his whole head under the water spigot, and see if he doesn’t. 

Just the thought of cool water rushing through his hair and taking salty summer misery down with it into the grass is enough to give him pause and, maybe, just maybe, tempt him to turn around and go back now.

But he can’t be heading back just yet. There’s still another couple miles of fence line to walk, because Doofus, just like her name, didn’t come in for water with the rest of the herd. Where the fuck that goat has got to is anyone’s guess, but _his_ guess is the fence, and he’s betting he’ll find her there before dinner or else walk a hole in his boot looking. 

Maybe get a few more yaupon twigs caught on his hat, a few more mesquite thorns shoved in his legs. 

Worse than snakes in some ways, mesquite. Snakes at least go out of their way to poke holes in you, and only when they can’t get out of _your_ way. Mesquite’s just a passively stabby bastard of a shrub. Tree. Whichever. Great flavor on a rack of smoked ribs, though, so it’s good for something at least. He oughta do that again, now that he’s thinking about it.

Bucky pulls out a yaupon leaf that tangled itself in the hat band, then puts the hat back on—anything to block the sun beating down, even if it’s a little over the top on the “Texas y’all” scale. But shit, can’t fault the cowboys for fashion that works. 

Hat like this is like walking around with your own personal hands-free umbrella. Generates a pretty good breeze when you wave it, too, which is good for fanning yourself or shooing the flies away. And he’d rather pick shit out of the hat than out of his hair.

And hell, it’s country to the last drop, sure, but no one expects him to hop on a horse to complete the look.

Well, almost no one. 

Tony sure as fuck had, when Bucky was first getting himself set up out here. But Tony’d come prepared with a country western ensemble straight out of a glossy costume shop catalog, complete with fringe-lined chaps. Because chaps are a thing people wear out here, sure. _All_ the time.

‘Course, he’d also come with a quinjet full of welding equipment, helper robots, wiring, and every intention of turning Mrs. Barrow-Hirsch’s house into the next sci-fi Fort Knox. But all the therapy in the world couldn’t chase the dead-eyed Winter Soldier glower (patent-pending) out of Bucky’s facial repertoire, thank fuck, and so he’d been able to keep the man busy at the perimeter and the house safely off-limits. 

It’s not even his house, for fuck’s sake. What is that little old lady gonna say, _honestly_ , if she comes to visit and see how her goats are getting along, and there’s a fucking communications center in the attic with a big old honking Heimdall-approved aerial receiver on the roof and a literal space-age Asgardian-Stark identification system spread through every room like a mechanical kudzu vine?

Probably not, “Why, dear, I love what you’ve done with the place.”

You know, if he had to guess. 

Maybe if the little old lady was Carter, and she was having one of her good days, when she has all her sass at her disposal and can be as clever with a compliment as Steve says she was before. 

But Mrs. Barrow-Hirsch is no Peggy Carter, for all she’s a stubborn little thing. She’s sweet and soft, and when she checks in, she sits on the porch next to him and drinks her tea that’s more sugar and ice than anything else, and pats the back of his hand and calls him “dear,” which he loves. 

But she’s not up for alien hardware on the roof.

Not a whole lot of people are.

* * *

He finally finds the damn goat about a mile and a half further along the fence line, bleating her head off and stamping her hooves as she tries to free herself from the gap between the wires she’s stuck her head through. Little idiot. 

“Just _gotta_ have the grass on the other side, don’tcha?” He shakes his head at her and huffs out a short laugh. 

This is so far from the first time this has happened that he’s starting to think it’s intentional. Doofus routinely fails to come back with the others in her herd for the mid-afternoon water break and general lazy lounging session, where the gluttons are too hot and tired to bother standing up, but too greedy to stop grazing for a hot minute. 

Bloated nannies loafing around in what’s supposed to be the hay field but is actually just pasture he bothers to water, like so many red and white clouds in a green sky, their heads turning this way and that like periscopes while they chew and then dipping down to tear up the next morsel of what is not ever going to make it to a bale or the market.

They’re on a schedule, his goats. They tell time better than any clock he’s got out here short of his own internal clock, which never shuts up about exactly how many minutes there are until the next thing on his task list. He knows exactly when they’ll start traipsing in, a loosely shifting formation with Friendly (ha) in the lead and Happy (double ha) bringing up the rear.

Long as they’re handled enough, goats are kinda like ill-trained dogs in their affection to the person feeding them, but they aren’t exactly nice to each other, and they definitely don’t have anything like a motto to leave no goat behind. So their schedule says “show up to drink some water and imitate a hungry, lumpy bean bag in the grass” and his schedule says “go count the girls and make sure the mean ones haven’t stuffed anyone in a locker.”

And because he does count them up, and because he knows each one of them by the pattern of their blotchy red and white and their personalities—instead of having to read the tags in their ears like apparently loads of other folks out here have to do—he doesn’t ever have to march out there and see who’s who and who’s running a bit late. 

This will be the third time he’s known after a passing glance to go looking for Doofus in particular, and the third time he’s found her with her fool head stuck in the fence.

This month.

He’d like to think he’s lost count of the year’s totals, but he’s pretty good at keeping track of things like that. Forty-seventh time’s a charm. He’s got half a mind to cut down a length of 1x3 furring strip and duct tape it to her horns so she can’t get her head through the fence in the first place. 

Lots of that lying around after he’d replaced the bathtub that spring and redone the insulation in the attic—thankfully before the worst of the summer heat kicked in and started beating down on the roof. Might as well use some of it. And she’d be cute, maybe, with a bit of wood taped to her head.

Could rename her “Handlebar.”

“Alright, doll,” he says, low and easy, as he closes the distance between them. “We’re gonna getcha outta there. You know the routine. Just hold on a sec.”

Doofus rolls her eyes back toward him and gives her head another jerk backward, which accomplishes exactly nothing toward getting free because her horns are keeping her anchored tight like a barbed arrow in a rib cage. If anything, all she’s achieving is rubbing a sore spot into her head behind her horns.

If ever a goat had earned her name…

“‘Kay, sweetheart,” he croons at her. “Let’s do this.” 

Bucky seats his hat more firmly on his head and then swings a leg around over the goat’s back up close to her shoulders, gets himself in a good position to reach down through a gap in the fence above the one her head’s stuck in without getting kicked or stepped on while he works. 

It’s pretty simple, long as you’re not a goat, to figure out how to fix a setup like this and get loose. It didn’t even take him a single false start the first time he had to do it, back in November, and the whole area had been so much mud and goat droppings churned up the billy’s wild scramble to get his horns out of the thicket. 

That had been Stinky, né Skippy, and Bucky had smelled like goat musk even after washing all the mud off himself. Week one. So exciting. He’d almost packed up and gone back to New York, except that was giving up, and he’d promised Mrs. Barrow-Hirsch to look after her place for the foreseeable future. 

That, and he’s fucking stubborn. No one but his therapist thought he could do this goat and country thing, not really, and so he doesn’t have any choice but to _do_ the goat and country thing, right in their fucking faces. That stopped being a reason by December, though. Turns out he just really likes the goat and country thing.

Who’d’ve thought?

Buck pushes Doofus’s head forward and down until the tips of her horns are clear of the metal—and yep, there’s the flower she must have been trying to eat when she got stuck, just an inch or two beyond her nose; and yep, there she goes trying to eat it again because she’s a goat named Doofus and everything about that is the simple, honest truth. 

He’s got time to let her strain and stretch and fail to eat the flower, and so he does. Nothing else to do today, after all. Not officially. And there’s four hours and twenty-three minutes until his next unofficial task: feed the greedy bastards. 

But it’s hot and they’re both thirsty, and she’s been in the fence for who knows how long, so her interest in that flower doesn’t last. From there, it’s easy to move her just so, angling her horns down and back until her head slides free of the fence. 

The ungrateful little idiot gives him an angry bleat and squirms out from between his legs before dancing to the side. She shakes her head, sending her long ears flapping against the sides of her neck, gives him one last baleful goat glare—and a tail wiggle for good measure—and then sets off at a trot for the pasture and her friends and the water trough he’d happily dunk his whole self into if he was anywhere near it right now, goat spit be damned. 

“Yeah, don’t thank or me or nothing,” he mutters after her with a smile. Fucking moron. How did goats even exist without people? Though, knowing Doofus, if it wasn’t people and their fences, it’d be something else.

* * *

It’s a long-ass trek back to the house, made longer by his choosing to take his sweet time doing it. 

He’s got to check and be sure Doofus hasn’t gotten distracted by another forbidden flower or hard-to-reach yaupon sprig, after all. It’s common enough she _has been_ so distracted that he doesn’t even count that as a repeat offense anymore when it happens. Just part one and part two—sometimes part three if she’s having a really dumb day—of the same head-in-fence shenanigans.

He really identifies with Doofus, but he’s only told two people about that in the whole wide world. Himself, and his therapist. No one else has gotta know. Not even Steve. Maybe especially not Steve, just because there’s no patient confidentiality with Steve, and Tony’d have a fucking field day with the nicknames if ever found out. 

Not that Steve would go sharing on purpose or anything. But team dinners and movie nights get pretty chatty. It could slip out. Steve’s not the world’s greatest secret keeper.

Turns out Doofus hasn’t been tempted by a flower, and he can actually see her tail wiggling back and forth through the brush as he catches up with her on the way back to the house and its pasture. She does that sometimes. Runs off and then changes her mind and lies in wait to play guide-goat the rest of the way home.

As though she were going to be any good at all at leading anyone into anything except where the best places were to put heads into fences. But she’s cute, for a total dumbass who earned her name. And man, does she ever remind him of himself.

He doesn’t mind following her back on this long-ass trek that plasters his shirt to his back and his jeans to his thighs and his hair to the inside of his hat. Fucking Texas summer, but what else did he expect when he came out all this way?

Gives him time to think, anyway, under the makeshift shade cast by the brim of the best damn hat in the world. 

And thinking isn’t so bad now that he has his own head mostly back and his thoughts aren’t _all_ combinations of remorse and self-hatred cut with the twisting, thorny brainworm bramble of trying to comply with orders he hasn’t even been given.

 _That’s_ something he doesn’t miss. 

And he doesn’t miss New York. Looking over his shoulder, wondering when he’s going to blink and open his eyes to find out a month’s gone by and it’s all been changed, his freedom rolled back, his body repo’d by the same people they’re all hunting down. 

Fuck. Waking up every morning, or at least the mornings after nights when he managed to sleep at all, wondering if this is the day he’s going to be refurbished and reboxed, put back on the shelf, a lonely little murder-bot on a dusty rack, waiting for the next ruthless sadist to wind him up and set him loose. Now with head-crushing action. Batteries not included. (But bullets are. Bullets always are.)

So many people in the City, almost all of them strangers, almost all of them viable threats to his paranoid brain, in the field and off it.

Who in that throng has the password to his brain, the signal that will call him home? Which of their spandex-clad enemies is packing a red book alongside the pump-action shakeweight laser blaster? When is the robot army going to turn _him_ back into a robot? 

Yeah. Big city paranoia. Definitely does not miss. Terrible service; two thumbs down. Would give zero stars if that was an option. But rating systems being what they are, he’s got one big red star instead. So. Big red star, need to avoid the crowds, why not the Lone Star State? Fucking poetic is what that is.

His therapist had laughed herself right off her chair when he suggested it. Wiped her eyes. Laughed some more. Told him it was a good idea, that she was proud of him for thinking it, for taking initiative, for thinking about what he _wanted_ his life to look like instead of just what he was afraid it _did_ look like.

Naturally, he’d cried like a fucking baby. It doesn’t take much, now that he knows how to do it again. He’s never gonna get used to people being proud of him. Not for anything that doesn’t end in dead people.

But here he is in fucking Texas, going on ten months now. Walking back from the first goat rescue of the week, housesitting—and goatsitting, sure, throw the girls in there for good measure—for a little old lady who doesn’t have any business trying to wade through the tall grass and snakes and thorns, but who is as stubborn as they come and won’t sell the place no matter what her kids want.

It’s nice. Better than he deserves, he sometimes thinks. But only sometimes. He’s coming around to the whole idea that maybe he deserves some good things in life. And maybe those good things aren’t gonna be flowers on the other side of the fence, tasty little nibbles that are both unattainable and inevitably made to trap him.

“I don’t deserve good things” is another thing he’s not going to miss, once it’s gone. Gone for good, and not just out traveling for a while and due back any day. Dr. Wineberg says it’ll happen. Just give it time. Practice mindfulness. Do his meditations. Make all his skype appointments. Take his meds. Call her anytime, for anything, if he even _thinks_ he might need to talk. 

He’s only had to take her up on that a couple times this year. March, when there was a cold snap he hadn’t expected and didn’t prepare for, and he’d woken up in the ravine and the kitchen at the same time and couldn’t feel his fucking metal arm. July, after Steve went back to New York again for the fifth and last time. July had been bad.

He shoves his hands in his pockets as he walks, doesn’t bother biting back his sigh. 

Life in Podunk, Texas (population: Bucky) isn’t what he expected it to be, not really. There’s a lot less cactus and a lot more goats. A lot more time to think and lot less Steve. That last is a problem. He really should have seen it coming.

There’s a whole list of things he doesn’t miss, or won’t miss when they’re finally gone. It’s a long list:

  * HYDRA. 
  * Trigger words. 
  * Not knowing where he is anymore. 
  * Hating himself. 
  * Blaming himself. 
  * Killing people. 
  * Not remembering _who_ he is anymore. 
  * Seeing all the things he’s done spread out in his mind and superimposed on whatever’s convenient.
  * Gift to fucking mankind…



Long, long, _long_ fucking list. Too long to go through in full without completely ruining his day, and so he almost never gets through even ten of the dozens of items on the list before remembering about self-care and putting the list away in the back of his head where he doesn’t have to think about it if he doesn’t want to.

There’s also a list of things he _does_ miss. It’s got one item on it, and one item only, because that one item eclipses all the others: 

  * Steve.




End file.
